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Facebook CEO says stock disappointing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the performance of his company's stock since its public offering "has obviously been disappointing".

His comments came in his first interview since the rocky offering in May.

Facebook's stock has lost half its value after one of the most anticipated stock offerings in history. The IPO priced at $US38, but shares soon fell sharply.

The stock closed up 62 cents to $19.43 Tuesday.

Zuckerberg spoke at the San Francisco Disrupt conference organised by technology blog TechCrunch.

Speaking in front of an audience, he told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington that the pressure over the stock offering is "not like the first up and down we've ever had".

The social networking site has nearly a billion users and counting. But the company's challenge is how to make money from it.

Zuckerberg likes to bring up Facebook's core mission - making the world more "open and connected". But investors want to know how Facebook will be a lasting business and how the company, created in 2004 with desktop computers in mind, will become a true mobile-first pioneer.

Zuckerberg talked up the company on Tuesday, saying, "one of the main things misunderstood right now is how fundamentally good it is".

The 28-year-old CEO controls more than half of the voting stock in Facebook, and the company recently put some investors more at ease when it said in a regulatory filing that he does not plan to sell any shares in the company for at least the next 12 months.

Investors are worried about post-IPO "lock-up" expirations that allow early investors and insiders to sell their shares.

In his letter to shareholders ahead of Facebook's IPO, Zuckerberg had stressed that "Facebook was not originally created to be a company."